On June 4, 2013, I stood in a room at the Nashville Public Library’s Downtown Branch where I witnessed a small crowd raise $36,000 in less than 10 minutes for the first 100 Day Challenge held in Nashville.
The most recent 100 Day Challenge is focusing on housing 100 families who experience homelessness in 100 days. United Way of Greater Nashville and Safe Haven Family Shelter lead the effort of 30 nonprofit and government agencies across Davidson County. The countdown of housing 100 families started on Aug. 28 and will last through Dec. 9, 2023.
While housing 100 families over the next three and a half months will not end family homelessness in Davidson County, deploying this proven methodology that sets a challenging, coordinated, and collaborative goal will have the power to improve our systemic approach and redefine how we, as a community, address family homelessness.
Let’s take the concept of a 100 Day Challenge apart and look at its history more in-depth.
As I mentioned earlier, 100 Day Challenges are not new. In the homelessness field, a humble leader called Nadim Matta founded the Rapid Rehousing Institute — now called Re!Institute — to implement 100 Day Challenges to improve systems. He started working with Community Solutions, a national nonprofit founded in 2011 that led the 100,000 Homes Campaign.
In 2013, the new director of the Metropolitan Homelessness Commission, Will Connelly, partnered with Community Solutions to launch one of the first 100 Day Challenges in the homelessness field that focused on housing 200 of the most vulnerable, chronically homeless individuals in 100 days. The effort, which we locally called the How’s Nashville Campaign, was chronicled in a 60 Minutes segment hosted by Anderson Cooper.
It was the beginning of Nashville’s coordinated effort to address chronic homelessness. Within the past 10 years, our city launched two more challenges — one focused on creating a coordinated entry system, and the second was a shortened 90 Day Challenge to speed up the housing efforts of Veterans. Now, Nashville is among one of the first cities nationwide to work with Community Solutions’ Built for Zero team on improving our approach to family homelessness. The ultimate goal is to meet functional zero* for family homelessness, which I described in a past column.
Re!Institute describes the 100 Day Challenge as a “methodology [that] brings everyone together, fostering a sense of urgency, a focus on tangible results, and the freedom to experiment.” 100 Day Challenges empower frontline teams to break down silos and fragmentation. It does so by creating communication tools to allow teams to be the drivers in how our community works with families. Furthermore, data is used to evaluate best practice approaches, so we know what works.
Thus, 100 Day Challenges are not just about meeting a specific goal like housing 100 families in 100 days. This effort is about improving how the current system works. The goal really is about overcoming fragmentation at the political and agency levels that often happens when there is a lack of working with non-governmental partners and people closest to the problem (those with lived experiences).
In short, the goal for Nashville family providers is to learn and grow together.
At a recent event on August 29 that announced the 100 Day Challenge, we were told that currently 480 families are on our community’s By Name List (BNL). BNLs collect data in real time and usually are reported out to community providers on at least a monthly basis. They are generally divided into several subgroups: Families, Individuals, Youth/Young Adults (18-24), Veterans, and People fleeing Domestic Violence.
In preparation for the 100 Day Challenge, Nashville already evaluated the quality of its Family BNL and found that on average, the community housed 29 families per month. Thus, the goal to house 100 families in 100 days will be slightly above that average. I hope to actually see more families being housed.
Regardless of the actual number of families housed, I believe the 100 Day Challenge is worth it for the following reasons. Our community will:
- Improve collaboration among family service providers;
- Be able to evaluate old and implement new processes as well as establish ongoing evidence-based approaches;
- Improve the quality of data collection, which will allow for a family-centered service approach (versus a provider-centric approach);
- Energize landlord engagement efforts and recruit more landlords to identify housing units;
- Deduplicate services and increase efficiency in service delivery; and
- Collaborate on the development of a communitywide Family Plan to sustain all processes we improved during the 100 Day Challenge.
It is critical to note that the 100 Day Challenge is not happening in a vacuum. United Way of Greater Nashville established an initiative called The Family Collective (TFC) whose mission is to prevent and end family homelessness. United Way launched TFC in 2014 together with Safe Haven Family Shelter and Catholic Charities. The collaborative effort has meanwhile expanded into a five-county area with dozens of partners. Since 2014, TFC has empowered more than 3,500 families (including 500 families in 2023 alone) to work toward self-sufficiency. TFC will be critical to help sustain the systems improvements our community hopes to make during the 100 Day Challenge.
What we learned from the first 100 Day Challenge in 2013 was that when we come together as a community, we will make a difference by breaking down silos, building trust around common goals, and most of all, improving service delivery with a housing-focused approach for some of the most vulnerable families in our community.
While homelessness is a symptom of inequity and systems failures (such as health care, criminal justice, education, etc.), homelessness providers still believe we can end homelessness for families, individuals, Veterans, youth/young adults and people fleeing domestic violence. Ending homelessness does not mean that no one will ever lose housing again. Rather, it means that our community comes together to implement a system that identifies families and individuals who have lost their housing quickly, coordinates resources to address each household’s needs, and is able to rehouse them quickly with the adequate supports.
In other words, let’s look at which resources are available for what populations, coordinate with each other, include the people we intend to serve in decision-making processes, implement a housing-first approach, evaluate our outcomes, continue to improve our efforts and ensure that we listen to each other.
The 100 Day Challenge is a starting point to energize frontline staff and demonstrate how Nashville stakeholders can improve the current system while simultaneously housing 100 families in 100 days.
*”Functional zero is a milestone, which must be sustained, that indicates a community has measurably solved homelessness for a population. When it’s achieves, homelessness is rare and brief for that population.” – https://community.solutions/built-for-zero/functional-zero/